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munchman sees A VERY MURRAY CHRISTMAS

Robert Mitchum’s corpse gives us his best Bill Murray face…and fails

by munchman

Talk about a predicament!

On the one hand, Yer Friendly Neighborhood munchola has to confess here and now that he absolutely lurves Bill Murray. Many’s the night, in fact, that I’ve YouTubed myself to sleep listening to My Hero spend a magnificent 59 seconds doing his inimitable rendition of the STAR WARS theme. Nobody does it like Billy Baby, not even Ella Fitzgerald.

On the other hand, I Netflixed A VERY MURRAY CHRISTMAS the other night, and, well, let me put it this way: Why the hell was the fantastically unfunny – and D-E-A-D Robert Mitchum running around the Carlyle Hotel pretending to be the Murrayman in a Christmas special so unspecial that it made director Sofia Coppola’s snoozily inept LOST IN TRANSLATION (which starred the real Bill Murray) look like (no, not an Oscar winner – never!) a Golden Globe nominee?

Here’s my tally:

THE GOOD:

Maya Rudolph can really fucking sing!

So can Miley Cyrus, who at her tender age, whatever the fuck it is, has blossomed into the one thing her father could never be – a consumate pro.

David Johansen lives and does a wonderful Tom Waits!

Paul Shaffer is a much better piano player than his David Letterman personality would ever have led me to believe.

THE BAD:

Bob Mitchum’s corpse’s terrible impersonation of My Beloved Bill.

The script, by Mitchum (I presume because it’s so damn dead), the gloriously connected and ingloriously untalented Ms. Coppola, and Mitch Glazer, who wrote the okay-because-it-starred-the-Real-Bill SCROOGED and who was married to the extremely cool Wendie Malick for a couple days, reminded me so much of THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES that I kept screaming, over and over, “There’s nothing there!”

Everything else but the music, which would have actually been kind of good if it wasn’t all, you know, that overtired Christmas stuff.

CONCLUSION:

Goddammit, you know what the conclusion’s gonna be: Stay away from this thing and the people who made it cuz the only thing they could possibly have been thinking of was was how much contempt they had for Netflix. Or Bill Murray fans. Or, I dunno, everyone.

yer friendly neighborhood muncher!

The grinch who calls himself munchman is TVWriter™’s official, authorized scapegoat. Now, just between us, aren’t you glad we have the lovely Diana Vaccarelli doing most of our reviews these days? Don’t you wish she’d done this one?